7.1.5 Summary: Pyropangenical Codes and Codification

“Having helped us to become the most successful species on Earth, seeds may also offer our best hope for saving us from ourselves”. Fry, 2016.

Unlike the avatar cities of Mesopotamian times, they of present [both ‘smart’ and simulated] are digital. However, as the 21st century advances, recent and anticipated near-future developments in biological data sensing, actuating, analysis, networking, and storage, together with resource shortages of materials from which microchips, amongst other electronic technologies are made, suggest a migration from digital back to physical. However, whereas codification of Bronze Age codes came in the form of cuneiform-inscribed stone tablets, that of the unfolding urban revolution will be biological, not geological: written in DNA.

Simultaneously, developments in biological information acquisition and processing, and advancements in satellite and aerial sensing and imaging are delivering a suite of real and near-to-real time insights into wildfire behaviour, and Earth systems more generally. Hence, wildfire monitoring now stretches from the nano to the planetary- scale, and from moment-to-moment.

Materially, biofabrication, in all its many forms, is enabling architectural to step beyond the spatiotemporal parameters of past, and into new conceptual territory. No longer is it fantasy to imagine that a building can behave in ways as may be described as ‘living’.

But, many are the dots yet to be joined; starting with building codes, for presently none of the above-cited material and information developments are accommodated for in wildland urban interface and fire codes. Thus, informatically and materially, the standards ascribed to building in the WUI today are akin to they of when Hammurabi was ruler of Babylon.

In the sections as follow, they being parts III – IV of the Case Studies, this matter will be addressed, as I converge the transdisciplinary findings from this study into scenarios and flash fictions that explore the potentialities for pyro-evolutionary architectures of replication, reproduction, and resistance.

>Continue to Chapter 7 [part II] here.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.